"Bill" wrote in message
news
http://abcnews.go.com/US/print?id=644388



Muratore told reporters he was "trying to be scrupulously honest with
you about what the potential is but that doesn't say that's what we
expect to happen."

I guess they didn't "expect" the Columbia and Challenger disasters either.
Wait, except there were those who did and were told to STFU.

He likened the situation to trying to predict the
chances of being in a fatal car accident while driving to the airport.

"If we have that worst day, and the tire is worn and you have a flat
tire in the wrong place in traffic, next to a truck going 90 mph,
could you get killed? Yes, you could. Is that a reasonable set of
assumptions to plan your trip on? Probably not."

Except if you're driving a car that you *know* has a bad tire at 90 mph,
your chances go way up. At this point, an accident-free trip becomes an
unreasonable expectation. When trying to put a shuttle in the air with
various known design flaws, the situation is far more critical. You can't
pull the Shuttle over on the side of the road if something goes bad.

What NASA has to do to get smarter, Muratore said, is to stop relying
on computer models and start flying the space shuttle again.

Yeah, that sounds like the "smart" way to go.

Spoken like someone who 1) is a well-paid lackey of NASA and 2) Isn't going
to be strapping themselves into the thing on launch day.

Does anyone believe things have really "changed" at NASA? Everything I've
heard sounds like, "we've piddled with this, we've piddled with that, but
it's still not really right and we don't know what's gonna happen any more
than we did before."